Technology in cancer research & treatment
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Technol. Cancer Res. Treat. · Feb 2014
Using a novel dose QA tool to quantify the impact of systematic errors otherwise undetected by conventional QA methods: clinical head and neck case studies.
Recent studies have demonstrated that per-beam planar intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) quality assurance (QA) passing rates may not predict clinically relevant patient dose errors. This work is to evaluate the effect of dose variations introduced in dynamic multi-leaf collimator (DMLC) modeling and delivery processes on clinically relevant metrics for IMRT. Ten head and neck (HN) IMRT plans were randomly selected for this study. ⋯ However, in the two scenarios, a strong and clear correlation between the dose differences for each of the organ structures was observed. This study confirms that conventional IMRT QA performance metrics are not predictive of dose errors in PTV and organs-at-risk. The clinically-relevant-dose QA has allowed us to predict the patient dose-volume relationships.